The Lunar Mansion Zhang (Extended Net)

Zhang (Extended Net) is the twenty-sixth of the twenty-eight xiu, the lunar mansions of traditional Chinese astronomy. Each xiu is a segment of the sky marked by a group of stars near the celestial equator, and together they divide the heavens into the belt through which the sun, moon and planets appear to move.

Palace, animal and place in the sky

This mansion belongs to the Vermilion Bird of the South, the quadrant of the sky lying toward the south, one of the four symbolic creatures among which the twenty-eight are shared out seven to each. In the later scheme that pairs every mansion with a creature, Zhang is assigned the Deer.

The twenty-eight mansions are among the oldest elements of Chinese sky-lore, attested well before the common era and used to track the nightly progress of the moon and to fix the calendar. The system is described here as that documented astronomical and calendrical tradition, from which its astrological uses later grew.